Installing Let's Encrypt Certbot 0.8.x on Debian Jessie

Let’s Encrypt is a free, open, and automated certificate authority. And its Certbot is “a fully-featured, extensible client for the Let’s Encrypt CA (or any other CA that speaks the ACME protocol) that can automate the tasks of obtaining certificates and configuring webservers to use them.”[^1]

There are a number of ways to obtain and install SSL certificates issued by Let’s Encrypt CA. This is about installing Certbot 0.8.0 release on Debian Jessie. But before continuing, a few things to think about:

The Let’s Encrypt Client (Certbot) presently only runs on Unix-ish OSes that include Python 2.6 or 2.7; Python 3.x support will hopefully be added in the future. … currently it supports modern OSes based on Debian, Fedora, SUSE, Gentoo and Darwin.[^1]

That’s why using Docker container installation method might be a better choice, because it does not mess up your existing libraries and it can use supported operating systems which might not be the one you are using.

Backports are recompiled packages from testing (mostly) and unstable (in a few cases only, e.g. security updates) in a stable environment so that they will run without new libraries (whenever it is possible) on a Debian stable distribution.

Backports cannot be tested as extensively as Debian stable, and backports are provided on an as-is basis, with risk of incompatibilities with other components in Debian stable. Use with care!

It is therefore recommended to select single backported packages that fit your needs, and not use all available backports.

Again, there’s why it might be a better idea to use a container. But, let’s proceed.

Add a new file named backports.list to /etc/apt/sources.list.d/ directory: